Anne M. Newell Deaths and Funeral Notices
Early in the morning of March 14, 2021, Anne Thurman Stranahan Newell drew her last breath at Frye’s Care Home in Eureka, California. She was just 5 months shy of living a full century. She was mother to us, Susan Stranahan Moskaly and Nancy Stranahan. We hope Mom can feel our intense gratitude and admiration. We want our mother to know that she was seen by her two daughters as a person of high integrity, and that she is deeply loved.
Anne was born Annemarie Thurman in Herten, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in the year 1921, the first child of the union of Bertha Fey and George Thurman. When she was almost five, she sailed past the Statue of Liberty and into the harbor of New York City, clinging to the skirts of her mother. When they landed in America, they were greeted by Mom’s father, George, who had traveled to America ahead of them to carve out a home in Willoughby, a small suburb east of Cleveland, Ohio. Anne was to spend both her childhood and the first decades of her married life in this snowbelt of Lake Erie and in the shadow of a great industrial metropolis.
The Thurman family was poor and ever growing. In addition to Mom’s older half-brother, Ferdie, and younger brother, George, both of whom were born in Germany, Mom eventually had five other siblings: Ruth, Evelyn, Paul, John, and Ernie. After graduating from high school, she worked briefly at Ohio Rubber Company in Willoughby, Ohio, and then worked as a telephone operator. In 1945, Anne married William “Bill” Stranahan (our father) of Euclid, Ohio.
Mother was, even for the era, unusually industrious, self-organized, self-disciplined, dependable and devoted to her family. She was liberal in her acceptance of diversity and individual expression, but she was old-fashioned in her deep-seated belief that a woman’s first obligation was to serve the husband and the second was to serve the family. Although Mom had many good traits that we emulated, being subservient to a husband was not one of them!
In possession of a brilliant mind, Mom loved to learn and was an excellent student, but was too shy and unsure of herself to accept an offered partial scholarship to an out-of-state college when she graduated from high school. Though we girls were raised in a blue-collar family, our mother had high scholastic aspirations for her two girls. Around the time we girls were graduating from elementary school, our usually submissive mother asserted herself to make sure we went to college. She bought her first car, one well-used and a bit beat up, and she took on employment, working as a secretary in our local high school. She insisted SHE would pay for our college education with her earnings, and she eventually did.
Mom fought for us, not only for our scholastic education, but also to give us activities which enriched us. We could have lessons in whatever we wanted, as long as we applied ourselves. So, we both had music and dance lessons. The fact that our smart and musically talented mother was never given these opportunities seemed so unfair that it would literally bring us to tears.
Mom showed a real talent for doing crossword puzzles and puzzles of all kinds. She religiously watched game shows such as Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and we believe had she gone to Hollywood to be on these shows, she certainly would have won a lot of money! Why do we think this? Well, at home, she was ALWAYS yelling out the answers WAY before the contestants would! We are not exaggerating!
Mom loved music of all kinds. Her family was too poor to pay for music lessons, but two neighbor girls, sisters, had a piano and taught her how to play. She was blessed with a natural ear for pitch, singing harmony effortlessly. She played piano by looking at a score for the melody line and improvising with the left hand, based on the given chords. Since we had not inherited her extreme musical talent, it was a mystery to us how she did this.
After our father died in 1984 at the age of 65, it was obvious and not unexpected that our mother floundered. Without our father, the rock, by her side, she was anxious, nervous, and probably very lonely. She left Nancy’s home outside Columbus, Ohio, where our father had died, and bought a condo in Venice on the west coast of Florida. She was familiar with this part of Florida, since Dad’s parents had retired in nearby Englewood and since Dad and she had enjoyed many winters down there. Before long, she yearned to have a man by her side again. She needed to serve a husband and family to be happy. In 1985, she married Carl John “Rick” Rickenbach, a retired serviceman. They had some pleasant years together, until Rick died in 1990. Over the next few years, mom resumed her yearning to fall in love and live with a man again. She did try to keep busy to distract herself. She bowled, she sewed, she swam, and she went on intellectually and physically challenging elder hostel adventures designed for seniors. She took good care of herself, and she looked marvelous. In 1993, she did fall in love again, and quickly married Wilton “Bill” Newell, a Canadian living in Florida. Unfortunately, this marriage did not last. They divorced in 2002
By the time Mom was eighty, signs of dementia began to show. The grace and humor which she approached her life, even with the increasing limitations of dementia, were notable. Because her social manners were impeccable, she was able to hide her dementia from most of our visitors in the early days of her decline. If she didn’t remember who someone was, she just faked it! The only way for a stranger to notice that Mom was struggling mentally was to stay long enough to hear her begin to repeat her stories.
While the dementia slowly grew over the years, rest of her physical body stayed relatively healthy and strong. After moving in with Susan in Eureka, California, in 2002, she religiously attended dance and exercise classes for seniors, several times a week. These classes meant the world to her. She was always telling Susan how much she loved the company of her fellow exercisers. In her mid-nineties, she began a major physical decline. At age 96, she had to stop attending her beloved senior exercise classes, and she soon entered Frye’s Care Home.
Although Anne’s siblings and first cousins all died before her, she leaves behind numerous nieces and nephews and their children. We wish to thank the great people at Frye’s Care Home for their devoted service.
Mom, your daughters, Susan and Nancy, love you. If either of us deserve being called a “nice” person today, if we are people of integrity, it is because of your great influence in our lives. Now that we, too, are elders in years, we think a lot about legacies. Though we have no children of our own, we do have creations and influences that will ripple out beyond our deaths, just as yours ripple out through the lives of myself and my sister. If we are destined to follow in your footsteps and live to be 99, know that we will do everything we can to make this world a bit of a better place before our time is over. Our legacies are your legacies, and whatever we do, we do not just for the world but in memory of you.